Team Rosters Featured Image Bug Fixed (?)

This is a call for some debugging and test assistance. If the following makes no sense to you, nevermind! It is only a problem for some premium themes, which is way I’m asking for help.

If you have experienced the long-standing problem with the the Team Rosters plugin messing up the Featured Images (aka “Thumbnails”) for posts on your site, I MAY have found a fix. If you would like to try it out, you can download it from the plugin’s development tree. You only need the mstw-team-rosters.php file. If you do try it out, please let me know how it works on your site.

League Manager Versions 1.2 & 1.3

League Manager versions 1.2 & 1.3 were released in the past few days to address two bugs in the previous version(s).

Version 1.2 fixes the bug which prevented game times from displaying properly in the shortcode displays (times were rounded to hours and minutes where zero’ed).

If you have changed some some settings for a sport, but NOT the schedule table time format, you will need to change the schedule table time format to any other setting, save it, then reset it to what you want.

Version 1.3 fixes a bug that most users may never encounter. If a team was removed from a league (via the Teams admin screen), it continued to be displayed in that league’s standings table (shortcode). It would not appear in the Update Records admin screen for that league. In fact, the team could even be deleted, and its record would still appear in the standings table!! Please don’t ask. 🙂

However, the correction sometimes causes the [mstw_league_standings] shortcode to display a message for existing leagues (with perfectly good records) similar to the following:

No records found in league pac-12-south.

Fortunately, this problem is easily fixed. Just update the existing records for the league in question; that is, load them in the Update Records admin screen, and re-save them without change. This video demonstrates the problem, and shows you how to make the simple fix.

Team Logos Now On Sale

You can now purchase logo sets for your favorite leagues at the the MSTW Store. Countless hours have been invested in building logo sets for testing the MSTW plugins. Why re-invent the wheel? Whether you don’t have the graphics skills, don’t have the interest, or just don’t have the time, you can jump start your website’s database of teams with pre-sized logos for MSTW schedule tables, standings tables, and scoreboards (41×28 px) or player profiles, team galleries, single game pages, and schedule sliders (125x125px).

All NFL, Pac-12, and Big-10 teams are available now. More NCAA Leagues, MLB, NBA, NHL, the Premier League, Euro-16 team flags, Olympic team flags, and more will be available in the near future. If there are team logos you need soon, feel free to contact me.

Pac-12 Schedule

Sample Scoreboard

Premier League Standings

Cal Schedule Slider

49ers Slider

More examples are available on the MSTW Development Site.

NOTE:
You are purchasing only the labor expended to convert the images to the optimal sizes for the MSTW plugins. At least one 41x28px and one 125x125px image. NO RIGHTS TO USE THESE IMAGES ON YOUR SITE ARE GRANTED OR IMPLIED. You must obtain the rights necessary to use each image on your site, which depends on your site (personal, commercial), and the organization owning the rights to the image.

MSTW League Manager 1.1 Now Available!

MSTW League Manager version 1.1 is now available on wordpress.org. Check it out in action on the MSTW Dev site.

In addition to a number of bug fixes and code cleanup items, the primary changes are:

  • Added a Next Game field to the Standings Tables
  • Standings Table - Next Game Column

  • Added links from standings table fields: Team Name to Team URL or Team Schedule, and Next Game to Single Game Page.
  • Added links from schedules table, team schedule table, and schedule gallery fields: Team Name to Team URL or Team Schedule, Location(Venue) to Venue URL or Google Map, and Game Time/Result to Single Game page.
  • Added [mstw_location_table] shortcode
  • Added venue groups to the venues(locations) admin screen and to the above shortcode. (This feature will be much more important a few releases down the line, when automatic scheduling will be introduced.)
  • Venue Shortcode

  • Added a show_home_away argument to the mstw_team_schedule shortcode, and .home-game and .away-game class tags to the team schedule tables. Combined, these two additions provide flexibility in displaying home games in a team schedule as shown below.
  • Team Schedule - Home Game Settings

MSTW Bracket Builder 1.0

MSTW Bracket Builder version 1.0 is now available on wordpress.org. Check it out in action on the MSTW Dev site. The MSTW Bracket Builder plugin is intended as a complement to the MSTW League Manager plugin. While League Manager supports the creation and display of “group play” for tournaments or round robin tournaments, Bracket Builder supports the creation and display of “knockout rounds” or tournament brackets.

test-tourney-bracket

Define and configure tournaments, add the games, and use the shortcodes to display either “brackets” (aka “knockout rounds”) or “game tables” (aka “fixture tables”). Both front-end displays and their contents can be customized with CSS, and a (growing) set of shortcode arguments to reflect your site’s “brand”.

euro-16-bracket

The plugin is now available, as is a library of man pages on this site. Video tutorials will be available for Gold Support members … hopefully soon. (Send in specific topics you’d like to see!)

euro-2016-fixtures

So what’s next? Several extensions to the base League Manager and Bracket Builder plugins are planned:

  • League Scheduler that will automatically create single and double round robin schedules, and assign venues to the games based on venue availability. View this as a running start; a schedule editor will be available to tweek schedules as necessary.
  • Bracket Builder will support more tournament formats – double elimination, consolation games – and automatically update bracket displays based on reported final scores of games.
  • Bracket Builder will be integrated with League Manager, so for example, tournament brackets can be automatically built for a league based on the league standings (seeding), and the front end displays can offer more information without duplicative data entry.
  • League Live Scoring will allow fans at games to update game status in real-time. League scoreboards will display status updates without the need to be refreshed.

When? I don’t know, but as you can see, progress is being made. If you have a favorite on this list, let me know!

MSTW League Manager 1.0 Released!

MSTW League Manager version 1.0 is now available on wordpress.org. Check it out in action on the MSTW Dev site.

Standings Table

For years league admins have been trying to fit MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards (the square peg designed for single teams, organizations, schools) into their league sites (the round hole), and not surprisingly things don’t quite fit. The MSTW League Manager plugin was created to address the needs of LEAGUE websites and admins. Create multiple leagues, and multiple seasons for each league. Create game venues, teams (with home venues and logos). From there, create league standings tables and/or create league games, and then scheduled and results tables. The tables and their contents can be formatted via a rich set of Display Settings, and front-end displays can be customized with CSS.

Schedule Gallery

The plugin is now available, as is a library of man pages on this site. Some video tutorials will be available for Gold Support members … hopefully soon.

Schedule Table

So what’s next? Several extensions to the base League Manager are planned:

  • A League Scheduler that will automatically create single and double round robin schedules, and assign venues to the games based on venue availability. View this as a running start; a schedule editor will be available to tweek schedules when necessary.
  • A Bracket Builder that will automatically create single and double elimination tournament brackets.
  • League Live Scoring will allow fans at games to update game status in real-time. League scoreboards will display status updates without the need to be refreshed.

When? I don’t know, but if you have a favorite on this list, let me know!

Coming Soon … League Manager

I have been contacted many times by admins attempting to use the MSTW plugins, especially MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards, for LEAGUES. The plugins were designed for a single team or a single school, not for leagues; so they are far from a perfect fit for leagues. So about a month ago, I finally decided to build a new MSTW League Manager plugin. Here are the basic features with some screenshots of the development version. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free e-mail them to me (but no promises!).

Basic Front End Features (not pretty yet, but you’ll get the idea):

Back End (Admin) Features:

  • Add multiple games on one admin screen
  • Update multiple games on one admin screen
  • Import teams from MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards (or your own spreadsheet)
  • Import games from MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards (or your own spreadsheet)
  • Individual Settings for each league – points calculations, order & display of columns, and much more
  • Hierarchical Leagues, for example NFL <-- AFC <-- East, West, North, South

Last but not least, and this will NOT be in version 1, I’m looking at a league scoreboard with LIVE UPDATES when games are in progress.

The plugin will NOT be feature complete in time for high school basketball season, but if you are interested in working with a BETA version for this basketball season, please let me know.

Schedules & Scoreboards 1.4.1 Released

MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards 1.4 was released last week, followed today by version 1.4.1*. See the previous post for the new functionality in 1.4. Version 1.4.1 corrects the following bugs:

  • Corrected a bug that prevented the schedule slider from starting at the next upcoming game. [Thanks, Jay. I can always count on you. 🙂 ]
  • Corrected bugs with the slider custom date & time formats. (Most users would never encounter these, but they are fixed.)
  • Updated the master translation file /lang/msw-schedules-scoreboards-en_US.pot [Sorry Anders, let me know what I missed!]

*Generally, I use version 1.X for changes in functionality and 1.X.Y for releases with bug fixes but no significant new functionality. Always read the changelog and the upgrade notice (in the readme.txt) before upgrading. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it.

Schedules & Scoreboards 1.4

Schedules & Scoreboards version 1.4 will be released very soon. Before deciding to upgrade, you may want to review the following information on the new features and how to upgrade from 1.3.

NEW FEATURES

– Show Sport on Schedule Tables and Sliders
This feature is for school sites that want to display all in-season sports on a single schedule table or slider. It adds the sport name and a “vs” or “@” to the schedule table or slider as shown in the screenshots below.

Schedule Table Showing Sportt

Schedule Slider Showing Sport

This feature is only available via the show_sport shortcode argument. There is no display setting on the Settings admin screen.

Something very similar can be accomplished using the show_schedule_name shortcode argument. However, this capability restricts schedule names, and does not include “vs” for home games and “@” for away games.

– CSV Import – Select Team to Import
Games can be imported as before without any change to the existing CSV file formats. However, if you are importing only one team’s schedule, and you do not want to add the game_sched_id column to your CSV file, there is a new control to specify the schedule to import. All games with an empty game_sched_id field (or if that column is not in the CSV file at all) will be imported to the selected schedule.

CSV Import - Teams & Games

– CSV Import – Import Team Logos
The controls for team logos has been changed. You may choose to move the logo image files, as specified in the team_logo and team_alt_logo columns, from an existing server or site to the Media Library of a new site. Or you may choose not to move the image files, normally because they already exist in the site’s Media Library. This functions exactly like the player photos in the Team Rosters CSV import. (There have been no changes to the CSV file formats.)

UPGRADE CAVEATS

Upgrades are fairly straightforward, MUCH more so than 1.3, but there are a couple of things to be careful about when upgrading.

– CSS Changes. Release 1.3 allowed you to put your site’s CSS customizations in the mstw-ss-custom-styles.css stylesheet in your theme’s main directory. If you have done so, then your customizations will NOT be overwritten upon upgrade. However the HTML ID’s and classes have changed, and the default CSS stylesheet has been simplified. Therefore any CSS customizations for the Schedule Table and Countdown Timer WIDGETS may be required. These changes simplify the style rules and decrease the size of the default stylesheet, thereby improving the plugin and your site.

– “Cheatin’ uh?” Message. This is a ‘standard’ message comes from the WordPress Roles & Capabilities system. The MSTW Plugins create two custom Roles, and a number of new capabilities. (Read more on how to use these Roles here.) Upon plugin activation, the proper capabilities are assigned to the custom roles, AND to the WP Administrator and Editor Roles. However, for reasons that I do not yet understand, the custom capabilities are sometimes not properly assigned to the WP Administrator and Editor Roles. The easiest way to fix this problem is to deactivate and reactivate the plugin.

– Updated Common Library. The mstw-utility-functions.php library is used by all the MSTW plugins. This design offers a number of advantages. However, the latest version of the library is not necessarily loaded when the plugin is activated, and this can cause errors. To ensure that the latest version of the library is loaded, deactivate all the MSTW plugins, activate the new MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards plugin, then re-activate the other plugins.